data.gov.ge — Georgia's Open Data Portal and the Gap Between Launch and Uptake

In 2015, as part of its Open Government Partnership Action Plan, Georgia's Ministry of Justice — through its LEPL Data Exchange Agency, now the Digital Governance Agency — launched a national open data portal, www.data.gov.ge, meant to let businesses, NGOs and citizens use government data freely and build services on top of it.

An independent 2018 assessment by the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI), published via K-Monitor, found the portal held only 161 databases as of April 2018 — concentrated in finance, education and science, and public governance — which the report called 'a considerably low number.' On the 2016 Open Data Barometer, Georgia scored a relatively strong 0.70 (16th globally) on the general right-to-information dimension, but a much weaker 0.51 (36th globally, 4th regionally) specifically on publishing laws and government data — a gap between legal openness and what actually got published.

IDFI's interviews with Data Exchange Agency staff identified the root cause honestly: no law obliges public institutions to publish on the portal, so participation depends entirely on each institution's goodwill, and most disclosed data stays in scanned PDFs rather than open formats. Partly to fill that gap, IDFI itself built and still runs a separate civil-society portal, OpenData.ge, populated from its own freedom-of-information requests. Georgia's case is a genuinely useful cautionary example: a well-intentioned national portal whose reach was capped by the absence of a legal mandate, not by technology.

Read the full analysis: https://data.gov.ge